[12] Free demonstration copies of the application were bundled with the November 1983 issue of PC World, making it the first to be distributed on-disk with a magazine.

This was made easier by Word for DOS having been designed for use with high-resolution displays and laser printers, even though none were yet available to the general public.

[24] It was also notable for its very fast cut-and-paste function and unlimited number of undo operations, which are due to its usage of the piece table data structure.

With the release of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick up and Microsoft soon became the market leader for word processors for IBM PC-compatible computers.

According to Joel Spolsky, Word Binary File Format is extremely complex mainly because its developers had to accommodate an overwhelming number of features and prioritize performance over anything else.

[43][44][45][46][47] The implementation faces substantial criticism, and the ODF Alliance and others have claimed that the third-party plugins provide better support.

The goal of the project was not to add ODF support to Microsoft Office, but only to create a plugin and an external toolset.

Among its features, Word includes a built-in spell checker, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and utilities for manipulating and editing text.

The tendency for people to exchange Word documents via email, USB flash drives, and floppy disks made this an especially attractive vector in 1999.

These macro viruses were the only known cross-platform threats between Windows and Macintosh computers and they were the only infection vectors to affect any macOS system up until the advent of video codec trojans in 2007.

[citation needed] This problem is deeply baked into Word's structure since 1985 as it does not know where page breaks will occur until the document is printed.

[77] Word continues to default to non-Unicode characters and non-hierarchical bulleting, despite user preference for PowerPoint-style symbol hierarchies (e.g., filled circle/emdash/filled square/endash/emptied circle) and universal compatibility.

[82] For example, pages containing large amounts of markup language text can be made visually more readable during the editing process.

Password to open a document offers much tougher protection that had been steadily enhanced in the subsequent editions of Microsoft Office.

Word's 2003/XP version default protection remained the same but an option that allowed advanced users to choose a Cryptographic Service Provider was added.

Nonetheless, a password can be fairly quickly picked with a brute-force attack, because its speed is still high regardless of the CSP selected.

Word 2007 offers significantly more secure document protection which utilizes the modern Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that converts a password to a 128-bit key using a SHA-1 hash function 50,000 times.

[87] Word 2007 introduced a redesigned user interface that emphasized the most common controls, dividing them into tabs, and adding specific options depending on the context, such as selecting an image or editing a table.

Word 4.0 came out on November 6, 1990, and added automatic linking with Excel, the ability to flow text around graphics, and a WYSIWYG page view editing mode.

Many people continue to run Word 5.1 to this day under an emulated Mac classic system for some of its excellent features, such as document generation and renumbering, or to access their old files.

Word 2001, released in 2000, added a few new features, including the Office Clipboard, which allowed users to copy and paste multiple items.

Word X, released in 2001, was the first version to run natively on, and to require, Mac OS X,[96] and introduced non-contiguous text selection.

[100] Word 2008, released on January 15, 2008, included a Ribbon-like feature, called the Elements Gallery, that can be used to select page layouts and insert custom diagrams and images.

It also included a new view focused on publishing layout, integrated bibliography management,[101] and native support for the new Office Open XML format.

[102] Word 2011, released in October 2010, replaced the Elements Gallery in favor of a Ribbon user interface that is much more similar to Office for Windows,[103] and includes a full-screen mode that allows users to focus on reading and writing documents, and support for Office Web Apps.

[111] Microsoft Write was one of the first Atari word processors that utilizes the GDOS (Graphics Device Operating System) part of GEM (Graphics Environment Manager) allowing the word processor to display and print graphic fonts & styles making it a multifont word processor for the Atari ST (a 2nd disk drive was required to run both Microsoft Write and GDOS).

The first mobile versions of Word were released with Windows CE in 1996 on Handheld PCs[116] and later also on Pocket PCs.The modern Word Mobile[117] supports basic formatting, such as bolding, changing font size, and changing colors (from red, yellow, or green).

[127][128] Word for the web is not able to edit certain objects, such as: equations, shapes, text boxes or drawings, but a placeholder may be present in the document.

While the review cited an excellent WYSIWYG display, sophisticated print formatting, windows, and footnoting as merits, it criticized many small flaws, very slow performance, and "documentation produced by Madame Sadie's Pain Palace".

in 1989 stated that Word 5.0's integration of text and graphics made it "a solid engine for basic desktop publishing".